


can the city forgive, I hear its sad song

by chiuling



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Light Angst, Pre-Movie: The Old Guard (2020), fandom write more andy-centric fic challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-21
Updated: 2020-10-21
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:14:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27139216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chiuling/pseuds/chiuling
Summary: The world is violent, time is long, and Andy is tired.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 49





	can the city forgive, I hear its sad song

**Author's Note:**

> apparently am incapable of writing a fic without titling it from a florence + the machine song

She surveyed the smoldering wreckage with an unreadable expression on her face. As she stood watching, the bones in her wrist snapped back into place and her wounds closed. She was used to the pain by now and hardly registered it. 

Andy knew, on an intellectual level, that she would never be able to save everyone. Still, frustration and resentment grew in her like a particularly vigorous weed, and she wasn’t able to uproot it—or really that interested, if she was honest. There was just too much—violence, pain, you name it—for her to be able to justify anything other than continuous, simmering anger.

Joe came up next to her, healed of his own grisly injuries from the plane hitting the ground at 900 kilometers per hour. Nicky and Booker were still picking through the debris for bodies, and Andy didn’t yet have the heart to tell them to quit.

“That was a rough one,” Joe said mildly. His clothes were in tatters. “We should leave.”

Andy sighed and uncrossed her arms. “We fucked up,” was all she said.

Joe regarded her. “Isn’t the first time, won’t be the last.”

She snorted and nudged a rock at her feet, not meeting his eyes. “Three hundred dead.”

Nicky was coming up to them now, apparently having given up on survivors as well. The catastrophe was just too immense for any other outcome. “Three hundred and six,” he said flatly. “Counting the crew.”

They stood in silence. The small fires dotting the scene began to die down. In the distance, thunder rumbled.

Booker joined them after a while, jamming his hands in shredded pockets, looking at the three of them like he was waiting for something.

Eventually Andy straightened and looked away from the plane. “Let’s go.”

They followed her into the wilderness.

#

After some alcohol and alone time, Andy cried. It wasn’t a regular activity of hers—last time was maybe the 40s, Germany—and it surprised her. She was alone in a room with a rock-hard cot and a slit in the wall for a window (abandoned convent, now a safehouse.)

She didn’t really want to cry, but she was too tired to summon the energy to fight it, so she leaned back in the cot and let a few tears fall, tickling her neck and ears.

It passed eventually, and she continued to stare up at the ceiling. For a moment she felt the passage of time like a physical thing, a millstone that pressed at her from every direction.

Three hundred and six. _And I couldn’t save a single one._

And the resulting accusation: _then what the fuck am I good for?_

Abruptly she sat up and swung her booted feet over the side of the cot. She needed air. And something else than the ceiling to stare at—or the spiral of her thoughts would take her places she’d rather not revisit.

#

Outside, the stars glimmered and stood silent guard, and Andy kicked up dust in the road with vehemence.

She was alone. Joe and Nicky were cooking, and Booker was in his room, probably brooding. She frequently felt sympathy for him; as awful as any of their lives had been, his wounds were the freshest and most likely to tear open at the slightest provocation.

But beyond their difficult and frequently dangerous comradeship, she had no idea if and how to help. She figured that if she ever solved that problem, it would mean she’d solved her own problems too—and that was implausible. So she escaped for walks and took it out on the gravel.

God, what were they doing chasing all these little chances to help a couple people? People died all the fucking time. The planet’s population had grown exponentially. Technological advancements meant more death—and worse kinds of death. In, say, 1200 BC, Andy could've taken out a whole band of violent raiders on her own, saved a city, moved onto the next. These days, no chance: four people was just too few, too weak, to make significant differences.

She could feel herself slipping into obsolescence, even now, even as she worked harder than ever to do something, anything, meaningful.

She reached a fork in the road, and instead of picking one, turned and made her way back to the house.

#

Inside, the three men sat on mismatched chairs around a rickety table. Booker looked fresh from a bath—cold water only, but better than nothing—and Joe and Nicky were similarly clean and wearing new clothes. In the same outfit from the plane, Andy felt dirty and out-of-place, an omen of death and destruction.

“Join us?” Joe asked pointedly when he saw her, with one raised eyebrow. He could probably see the anguish radiating out of her. He was perceptive like that.

She struggled against herself, then relented and pulled up a stool. Whatever it was smelled good, and her appetite returned as Joe served her a bowl of rice and stew.

They ate in silence. After, when Nicky was washing the dishes and Booker had leaned back and lit a cigarette, Andy stayed, not quite knowing why, but not wanting to be alone just yet.

“We did our best,” Joe said after a long silence. He wasn’t looking at Andy, but she felt like it was for her.

No one answered. The sound of dishes clinking was the only sound for a moment, and then Nicky turned to look at Andy.

“What do you need, Andy?” he asked. There wasn’t much emotion in his voice, but his expression was honest and uncritical.

She didn’t know how to answer, and so remained quiet for a while. It was usually that way with Nicky, doing her best not to fuck up basic emotional competence so he wouldn’t catch on, but he would catch on anyway, she’d try to bullshit her way through, and the cycle would repeat. This time, though, she was just tired enough, and maybe just vulnerable enough after crying, that she considered her words carefully.

“It’s hard,” she said haltingly, and cleared her throat to give her time to string ideas together in her mind. She sat forward, elbows on the table, neck in her hands. “I don’t really know why this time is so bad. Maybe it’s—how many it was. It’s usually fewer. Maybe it’s how—” She closed her eyes briefly, then opened them again— “how violent it was. The crash. A lot of screaming. No one able to save each other or themselves. And we thought we could, up until we couldn’t.”

Nicky nodded, tracking with her perfectly.

“We don’t get to feel powerless all that often,” she said ruefully, and sat back. “We’re the ones with the plans and the weapons and the inability to fucking die. We’ve saved so many people, so many times. When it goes wrong, it hurts. When it goes this wrong…” She trailed off.

“It makes you question yourself,” Nicky said.

“Yeah,” she said.

It wasn’t the first time they’d had similar conversations, but it was probably the first time Andy admitted to how poorly she was dealing with it, and that felt—well. It was something.

Beside her, Booker exhaled smoke and looked away.

“Take some time off,” Joe suggested, looking at her sympathetically. “Get away from it. Do something different. No violence, no saving people, for a year or so—do you a world of good.”

She had to crack a smile at that. Joe and Nicky meant well, but that weight would never leave her, even on some godforsaken holiday. “Thanks,” she said instead. “I’ll think about it.”

#

Afterwards, she was standing on the porch when she smelled cigarette smoke and turned to see Booker leaning against the door frame.

“You stink,” she told him, and turned back.  
After a while, he asked, “Do vacations ever help you?”

“No,” she answered truthfully, glancing back at him. “Not really.”

“Take one anyway,” he said. “It’s better than—” He waved his hand.

She understood. “You’d better too. Somewhere nice. Corfu, Mallorca.”

He coughed into his sleeve and shook his head, barely hiding a smile. “Too many tourists.”

“Go in the winter. No one’s around.”

“That’s even worse.”

It was. She shrugged. “Have it your way.”

He joined her on the steps and peered up into the sky. “Hate to say it, but you should try to sleep.”

“Speak for yourself,” she retaliated.

“Slept on the plane.”

“The hell you did. You never sleep on planes.”

He half-smiled. “How do you know?”

“Two hundred years, that’s how.”

“Only eighty with passenger planes.”

She rolled her eyes. “Eighty years, then.”

Crickets chirped. Somewhere, an owl hooted.

Booker spoke abruptly, breaking the low sound of the night. “You think we’ll—” He stopped and restarted. “Think there’s a point to this?”

She didn’t answer for a while. She knew her answer. She knew Nicky and Joe had their answers.

“It’s fine,” Booker said. “Never mind.”

She looked at him, then away again, staring into the darkness. “I really don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if we can know. It’s not—it’s never been granted to us. To know.”

He grunted in agreement and shuffled his feet. “Think they’re wrong, then?” he asked, jabbing a finger back at the dining room.

She shrugged. “If it works for them, it works for them. Maybe they just know.”

“It’s just not granted to us,” he said with a trace of frustration.

Andy turned and looked him in the eye. “Can you deal with it?”

It was a question to herself too. He seemed to realize.

“Hope so,” he said.

She turned back to the stars. He did too, after a second. The questions racing through her mind weren’t any less demanding. The weight of the world wasn’t any lighter. And tomorrow would be just as hard as today, if not worse.

“Let’s go in,” Booker said finally. “Leaving at dawn, right?”

“Yeah,” she said, with a barely-suppressed sigh, and looked at the sky one more time before following him in. The stars weren’t as bright as they had been even a couple hundred years earlier. But they, like her, would stick around, even if they were growing dimmer.

She’d last as long as she could.


End file.
